A little too tightly wound, humors maladjusted, vitamin D deficient, we needed resort therapy.
Our room at the Corazón Cabo Resort & Spa in Mexico had a Veracruz travertine balcony overlooking the Sea of Cortez. It gave us grave pleasure to sit there early in the morning, Nespresso coffee in hand, the air like silk pajamas, and watch the dawn come. Flocks of pelicans flew by in formation. Occasionally, one would dive-bomb the water and take flight again with a fish in its bill. There were always stragglers. Stragglers ourselves, we worried. Would they lose sight of their family?
Below us, workers began neatly rolling towels onto pool chaises. The insufficiently appreciated music of clanking plates and cutlery from servers setting tables began. When the sun finally rose above the horizon and blinded us, we returned inside to perform our morning ablutions. We felt plenitude.
Sea and Food
Breakfast could wait. We’d come 2,000 miles from Oregon, from the kind of winter weather most likely to provoke bronchitis, and it was imperative that we swim in the warm(ish) ocean, as yet unroiled by wind. No toes in the water for us. We entered pelican-style. An elixir. We roughhoused and rollicked like retrievers until breathless. We saw fingerlings with yellow fins, just at the shore edge. Now we had an appetite.
There are several restaurants here serving mainly the same menu. Waiters somehow knew us by name and greeted us warmly with fist bumps. We chose to eat beside the water at the Corazón Beach Club, with the sides open and a thatched roof. It reminded us of a beach shack in Ceuta, Spain, which we loved, serving epic barbecued squid. A virtue of visiting in January is avoiding the torrid heat of summer. If the perfect is the enemy of the good, then the temperature here was a sworn foe.
Mexican cuisine began, as all great cuisines do, as food of necessity: economical, ingenious, deeply local, designed to nourish people who worked the land. We had a Quesabirria for breakfast, a quesadilla with not only cheese but birria (Mexican pulled beef) inside, folded like a taco. We dipped it into an aromatic beef consommé, one of the tastiest Mexican dishes we’ve ever eaten.
In French, “avocat” means “lawyer.” It also means “avocado.” Lawyers may be edible, but, in our view, don’t make nearly as delicious a guacamole as avocados, the sort featured on most of the Corazon’s menus. We ate enough of this at various meals to take on a greenish tinge.
Not only are avocados ubiquitous here, but so are limes. As blood banks maintain reservoirs of plasma, so the Corazón maintains reservoirs of fresh-squeezed lime juice. For margaritas. We drank a number of them. And why not? They were medicinal tots. Surely our health insurance would cover the cost. Their passionfruit version was our favorite.
Bars and Other Therapies
One of us believes that Tequila is the only spirit for a margarita. The other, Mezcal. Only the kind of maturity that is hard-earned prevented conflict. Also, we had a pass that entitled us to limitless amounts of either. The Corazon’s bars open at 7 a.m. for those seeking maximum therapy.
The bars provide one kind of therapy. Their spa, Sparitual, provides another. Susan had a “Me Time” massage and facial and a mani/pedi that helped knit up her ravelled sleeve of care.
My sleeves are not susceptible to this form of knitting, however. I needed something stronger. Snorkeling. So we reserved a snorkeling excursion to Santa Maria Bay with Pezgato Amazing Adventures.
The noisome harbor from which we embarked recalled the cantina scene in the first Star Wars film—a place where it helps to stay frosty. Years ago in Marrakesh, a hawker placed a monkey in Susan’s unsuspecting arms, to which both she and the monkey violently objected. In the harbor area, lively with hawkers and touts, a bold fellow tried to place an iguana in her arms. But Susan, being the sort of woman who learns from experience, emphatically disobliged him.
Sea and Sound
Once we cleared the fraught harbor, the world widened. We saw whales and spouts on our way to the snorkel site, leviathans indifferent to our small dramas.
We swam languorously through schools of colorful fish – a piscine Kandinsky – as in a dream, and my ravelled sleeves fully reknit. Journeying back to port, one of the mates walked among the passengers, pouring glugs of Tequila directly into their gaping gobs as though they were baby birds. Crazy, not stupid, we declined.
The pounding synthesizer music they serenaded us with was so loud that the alarms on both our Apple watches went off, warning of temporary hearing loss.
Mexican, Fused
That evening, Chef Eric De Maeyer, trained in Europe’s hard-school kitchens, shared fusion-forward Mexican cuisine with us at his extraordinary Chef’s Table. We had a Caesar’s salad (invented in Tijuana in an Italian restaurant) made tableside, in the grand manner, as anchovy-rich as it should be. He garnished it with caramelized Mexican shrimp.
We ate tortilla soup broth and crab consommé poured stylishly, from two separate carafes, over an entire deep-fried softshell crab. Caribbean lobster in butter, ever so slightly gamier than Maine lobster, like elk compared to beef, was the main entree, washed down with Mexican wines of true gravitas.
©Susan Greenberg
Dessert was various pâtes de fruits, including mango and guava (Mexican ingredients, French technique), in a sweetened coconut broth (Southeast Asian). It was the lyric, “We are the world,” made comestible. The room was lit by a Pleiades of candles in elegant glass.
Last night, we sat on our Veracruz travertine balcony, just cool enough to warrant light sweaters. A cruise ship so large that it displaced enough water to raise sea levels floated improbably close to shore. As it grew darker, it lit up like a horizontal Hong Kong skyscraper. Large sailboats, framed by purple lights, serenely passed, like couriers between this coil and the next. We were restored, rebooted, reknit. The Corazón’s therapy was complete.
You May Also Enjoy Reading:
The Tastes of Baja California, Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe
Hacienda del Mar Los Cabos: A Luxury Resort Steeped in Mexican Heritage and Traditions
Read more from David and Susan at The Ardent Gourmet.
